Prospective undergraduates

Not only is our campus one of the most beautiful, but studying at our department can lead you to a vast number of lucrative career opportunities, with our graduates in demand in almost every sector of the economy. Our department has won numerous international awards and have produced world-renowned engineers. Proof of our outstanding quality is the speed at which our engineers are usurped by the labour market. In other words, our electrical and electronic engineering graduates usually find work (or should we say answer their calling?) before you can say Ohm’s law.

The BEng programme in Electrical and Electronic Engineering will equip you with a broad knowledge base for a variety of career opportunities. The third and final years build on the base of mathematics and engineering sciences established during the first two years, with engineering applications in the fields of electrical energy, electronics, electromagnetic systems, computer systems, control systems and signal processing.

The programme is certified by the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA), which will enable graduates to register as Professional Engineers. The Washington Accord also certifies the international acceptability of the Stellenbosch University engineering qualification. So in short, the degree we offer is accepted internationally. Moreover, many of our students enter the international labour market and excel in multinational companies.

An interactive Academic Support Programme is available for students from a disadvantaged background.

The Department offers one four-year Bachelor’s degree programme in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, with four specialisation branches. These are Informatics, Energy, Robotics, and Telecommunications. Specialisation starts in the second semester of the third year of study.

Informatics
This branch is focused on high-level computer science and software systems (such as internet communications, virtual storage, etc.), but also gives a student a good foundation in computers and data, and includes hardware and software design in both high- and low-level languages. Students who follow this branch are enrolled for three of the four final-year modules of the BSc Computer Science degree in their final two years.

Energy
In the Energy branch, students learn about electric motors, generation of power, renewable energy, control of energy and computer-controlled power management.

Robotics
The Robotics branch focuses on the area where mechanics meets electronics, and covers the design of robot vehicles, unmanned aeroplanes, and satellites. The department has been extensively involved in the development satellites built here in South Africa, and is a leader in the field of satellite engineering.

Telecommunications
Our world is filled with communication devices such as cellphones, radio and television recievers and GPS systems. Microwave signals modulated with encoded information streams, transmit sporting events across the world in fractions of a second, enabling us to watch in the comfort of our homes. This is made possibly through telecommunications theory. This branch of the course focuses specifically on the knowledge of electronics, high-frequency techniques and the transmission of data needed to enter this broad field within E&E Engineering.

In the first year, all engineering students follow the same courses in order to acquire suitable mathematical and scientific skills. From the second year onward, the pure mathematical content starts to make way for engineering course modules where the mathematics is applied to engineering problems and also sometimes developed further, as required. Thus in the second year, the different engineering degree courses start to diverge.

Up until the end of the first semester of the third year, all E&E Engineering students follow the same set of modules. This gives the students a broad, well-rounded foundation that will enable them to move into any facet of the electrical and computer engineering job market.

At the start of the second semester of the third year, students can start to pursue one of the four specialization branches. As students at this stage already have significant knowledge of the different disciplines in E&E Engineering, they can make an informed choice about the rest of their programme.

The four branches continue into the fourth and final year, and each student ends their programme with a final-year project. A significant portion of the final year of study is allotted to this project, which is the culmination of four years of study.

The programme not only addresses mathematical and technical engineering issues, but also engineering-management skills, with all final-year students taking a module on entrepreneurship.